In The Lord of the
Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Deck-building Game, you take on the role of
Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, or one of their brave and heroic allies in the struggle
against the forces of the Dark Lord Sauron! While you begin armed only with
basic combat maneuvers, you will add new, more powerful cards to your deck as
you go, with the goal of defeating the deadly forces that serve Sauron as you
make your way towards Mount Doom. In the end, the player who has
accumulated the most Victory Points from the cards in his or her deck wins the
game.

Each player takes on
the role of an iconic hero from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the
Ring, including Aragorn, Frodo, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Samwise, and Boromir.
Each hero comes with a special power unique to that character and usable only by
that player.

Each player starts with
his or her own basic ten-card deck and draws a hand of five cards each turn.
Power is the currency you will use to buy new, stronger cards to add to your
deck. The goal of a deck-building game is to craft your personal deck into a
well-oiled machine. There are five different types of cards that can be
acquired: Enemies, Allies, Artifacts, Maneuvers, and
Locations.

To bolster their
existing deck of cards, players use Power to acquire cards from “The Path,” a
large, central stack of cards that supplies a five-card line-up from which
players make their purchases. Each player will always have five face-up cards to
choose from each turn, so every turn there are new options and
surprises.

When a player has
amassed enough Power, he or she may defeat more powerful enemies from the
“Archenemy” deck. “Archenemy” cards are represented by the notable enemies from
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, including Saruman, and the
Balrog, among others. When an “Archenemy” is defeated, a new one appears and
makes an Attack against each player in the game! Players can defend themselves
with Defense cards like Boromir’s Shield, Mithril Armor, “You Shall Not Pass!”
and several others.

The objective for each
player is to acquire the most “Victory Points” at the end of the game. Nearly
every card acquired during the game has a Victory Point value, with the
“Archenemy” cards providing the most Victory Points. In the end, the player who
has accumulated the most Victory Points from the cards in his or her deck wins
the game.

Key Selling
Points

•
Play as Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Samwise, Legolas, Gimli, or Boromir. The
Fellowship is prepared to begin its journey!

•
Each Hero of the Fellowship has a unique special ability that will open up
different strategies to the player.

•
Card combos, strategy, and fun abound in this game where every card features
amazing fan-favorite scenes from The Lord of the Ring: The Fellowship of the
Ring.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Talking with some other retailers, the general feeling was
of a good sales day, some retailers calling it their best sales day so far this
year while also remarking on a lack of excitement among customers about the
offerings, especially with those that were put up as PDFs immediately after the
event, though I see someone offering the D&D module, , "Dead in the
Eye" on eBay for about $18. Other retailers looked at it as a way to
say “Thank You” to their customers and didn’t report any greater sales than a
normal Saturday.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Eighteen publishers participated in this year’s Free RPG
Day, about the same number as last year and up from previous years.Included in this year’s offerings were titles
for Dungeons & Dragons, the Pathfinder RPG, Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG,
Conspiracy X, FFG’s Warhammer 40K RPG, the Harn RPG, Cosmic Patrol and
Quickstart rules for both Shadowrun and Battletch, as well as dice from
Q-Workshop and Chessex and smaller assortment of offerings from other
publishers.All in all, a pretty good
selection.The Pathfinder offerings went
pretty quickly as did the D&D offering from WOTC (That we were running
demos of both games here all day helped with that). There were a number of
single items this year as well, sample products from three or four small
publishers.Not certain how other stores
handled this but we did a drawing for them and gave them away at the end of the
day.Off World Designs included an XL
Free RPG Day t-shirt in every kit, with the option to order more.

According to Ghiozzi, 385 stores participated this year,
down from last year’s total of 420, but every one of the 603 kits produced sold
out, as usual.We had a line of about 10
people waiting to get in when we opened the store(I think it was mainly the Free RPG Day
offerings but the free hot dogs and barbeque may have helped).As is usual, Free RPG Day was great sales
wise for us, our third best day of the year so far, only eclipsed by Free Comic
Book Day and the Avacyn Restored/ Galactic Overlord pre-release one-two
punch.We pulled out the dice and single
items (Blue Panther dice tower, Dice Candies chocolate dice,Gaming Paper’s Pathfinder adventure, Brass
& Steel’s Quickstart rules and the Castle’s and Crusades Quickstart rules),
gave two dice to each of our GMs as a thank you for running events, and let
every customer choose one item from the remainder.They could pick additional items for each
stamp they earned on their Castle Card or for every 5 cans of food brought in
for the local homeless shelter (We wound up collected about 50 pounds of canned
food over the course of the day.Bearers
of Preferred Customer cards also got an additional item. For each item
customers selected from the display, they received one entry into the 5 p.m. drawing
for the single items.Customers had to
be present to win and we had about 20 people present for the drawing.Overall, a very good day.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

The long awaited Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman
Games finally arrived a week or so ago and it is BIG, over 470 pages of
material for $39.99.Customers have
responded well to the book as we sold out of our initial order within a couple
of days and have sold through three-quarters of the restock we received.However, given that it is 470+ pages of
material, including an index and a character sheet and forgoing one of the
appendices or some of the 10 pages of promotional material at the end would
have certainly helped players.With this
much stuff between two covers, the two page table of contentsjust doesn’t cut it.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The new supplement for Victoriana, Marvels of Science and
Steampunk, arrived last week.I see that
Cubicle 7 has jumped on the current Steampunk bandwagon.Originally, Victoriana was designed as the 19th century, only with magic
(rather like Amazing Engine’sFor Faerie, Queen & Country.Never heard of it?Neither did most people).However, it appears that a magical Sherlock
Holmes is not enough, we have to have magical and steam technology as
well.Oh, well, maybe this supplement
gives them another market to go after.Steampunk seems all the rage at science fiction conventions for the past
couple of years, so perhaps some advertising targeted at that segment would
help sales of the game.Certainly could
not hurt, save for the expense.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Free RPG Day is
this Saturday, June 16!
Visit a
participating store near you (like Castle Perilous Games & Book) to pick a free copy
of the DCC
RPG Free RPG Day module. It includes two new
adventures, plus details on the Mystery Map Adventure
Design Competition. The first adventure is The Undulating Corruption,
by Michael Curtis, which is a level 5 expedition to cure
a wizard of corruption. The second adventure is The Jeweler that Dealt in
Stardust, by Harley Stroh, a level 3 heist
where a clever thieves can excel.

The Mystery Map
Adventure Design Competition is an exciting
chance for aspiring game designers to earn $1,000 and
see their adventure in print. You'll find the Mystery
Map within our Free RPG Day module. Finish the map,
pitch us on the adventure you would write around it, and
see if you have what it takes to write DCC RPG
adventures! The winning adventure pitch will land a
$1,000 contract.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

TLG is proud to announce the return of a classic of the d20 era! Bluffside: City on the Edge!

Bluffside:
City on the Edge, first released in 2001, quickly took the RPG
community by storm! A brilliantly compact city setting Bluffside brought
a world of useful, fun information to table tops everywhere. TLG has
worked out a deal with our old friends Hal Greenberg and Doug Herring to
publish a full print version of Bluffside City on the Edge for Castles
& Crusades.

"Bluffside was my favorite d20 publication,
barring Living Fantasy by Gary Gygax," remarked Stephen Chenault of TLG.
This setting rolled out the print shop doors and landed right on my
gaming table. It merged perfectly with Aihrde as presented in our own
Codex of Aihrde (Erde at the time). Davis and I are both stoked see this
classic join the ever growing list of Castles & Crusades titles."

Bluffside:
City on the Edge Civilization is still picking up the pieces following
an asteroid strike two hundred thousand years ago. The epicenter?
Bluffside. Only 208 years after its rediscovery, Bluffside is a boom
town boasting the most precious metal in the known world - adamantine.
From the ancient ruins of Sem La Vah, to the vast Undercity, to the
floating port of Sordadon, Bluffside: City on the Edge promises to
become the home port for thousands of adventurers. Used as a stand alone
city, or combined with other sourcebooks, thereby creating a modular
world one great area at a time.

We are lining up cover artist Jason Walton of Myriad Studios to bring the City on the Edge back to life!

Hal
Greenberg had this to say, "We (Doug and I) have taken a step back from
game design for a while, what better way to come back then bring back
one of our favorite projects for Castles and Crusades. We will be
re-stating all of your old favorites and adding 12 new Places of
Interest as well as designing 2 new NPC tables for their wealth and
general reaction to your players for a quick and easy guide to make
GMing in this city less stressful, easy and fun, which highlights some
of the great features of C&C. We can not wait to hear the thoughts
of the C&C fanbase once they get this giant city in their hands. For
those that do not remember Bluffiside contains: new creatures, new
races, dozens of new items and over 100 NPC's for the city to bring your
campaign to life."

Hal Greenberg's own ground-breaking company
Thunderhead Games originally published Bluffside: City on the Edge. In
2002 Thunderhead merged with Mystic Eye Games owned and operated by Doug
Herring. Both veterans of the d20 wars bring all their flair and magic
back to the gaming table.

Monday, June 11, 2012

I had the opportunity to talk with Boyan Radakovich,
associate producer for the show, about its genesis and the main thing about the
program that concerns retailers, the link directing viewers to Amazon if they
desire to purchase a copy of that episode’s game.

TableTop originated out of Google’s desire to move towards
providing more professionally produced videos on YouTube, getting away from
user generated and scattershot material such as “Keyboard Cat” and “Charlie Bit
My Finger”. While some videos racked up huge viewing numbers, millions of more
didn’t. Google funded the project with
approximately $100 million and tapped actress, writer and producer Felicia Day
to create a channel. Day, best known
for her webseries “The Guild, then contacted occasional Guild guest star and
gaming aficionado Wil Wheaton to create a series for the new Geek & Sundry
channel. introducing people to games he liked. Wheaton turned to Radakovich, a creative
consultant for the games industry, to bring the idea to fruition. The result is TableTop.

TableTop’s first season will run 20 episodes, with a new
episode released every other Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. With that release schedule, Radakovich
expects the first season to run through early 2013. I found it interesting that
the shooting schedule ran a total to 10 days with two episodes shot per
day. Each episode took approximately six
hours to shoot, not counting post-production, so by my count, that meant the
crew put in 12 hour days during the filming of the first season. The company has already shot all of this
season’s episodes, so no use contacting them to see if they will feature your
game this year. A second season will
depend on how successful this one turns out as YouTube will not decide until
late 2012 whether to fund a second season.
Success for TableTop will be determined by number of views and
subscriptions to the channel. No idea
what Google will consider good numbers but the Small World show, first in the
series, has racked up just shy of 600,000 views.

The retailers I have talked with have overwhelmingly
embraced TableTop. The only complaint is
the link on each video directing the viewer either to the publisher’s homepage
(in the case of Days of Wonder) or Amazon to purchase the game. Radakovich says that, after getting feedback
from the gaming community, including retailers, the show will remove the links
soon.

With the exception of Settlers of Catan and Munchkin(both of
which are among our best sellers), all of the games featured on TableTop (save
for Get Bit, out of print when I last checked) have seen a spike in sales since
appearing on the show and it appears the same at a number of other retailers. Radakovich hopes that retailers will use
TableTop to further grow the gaming community in their area and especially wants
to make sure retailers take advantage of the two week lead time between the
announcement of the next game featured and the show on which it appears (Castle
Panic is next) to stock up if needed. There’s even talk of a DVD compilation
available after the end of the season, which would be a great sales tool should
it happen.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The new supplement for Victoriana, Marvels of Science and
Steampunk, arrived last week.I see that
Cubicle 7 has jumped on the current Steampunk bandwagon.Originally, Victoriana was designed as the 19th century, only with magic
(rather like Amazing Engine’s For Faerie, Queen & Country.Never heard of it?Neither did most people).However, it appears that a magical Sherlock
Holmes is not enough, we have to have magical and steam technology as
well.Oh, well, maybe this supplement
gives them another market to go after.Steampunk seems all the rage at science fiction conventions for the past
couple of years, so perhaps some advertising targeted at that segment would
help sales of the game.Certainly could
not hurt, save for the expense.